Mitigating DDoS Attacks Using Protection Nodes in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) allow mobile hosts to form a communication network without a prefixed infrastructure. Although it provides high flexibility, it also brings more challenges for MANETs to fight against malicious attacks. However, the property of mobility and redundancy also inspires new ideas to design defence strategy. In this paper, we propose a strategy to mitigate DDoS attacks in MANETs. Assume that a malicious attacker normally targets specific victims. The attacker will give up if the attack failed to achieve the desired goals after a certain length of attacking time. In our protection strategy, we take advantage of high redundancy and select a protection node. Once a DDoS attack has been detected, the suspicious traffic will be redirected to the protection node. The victim will function normally, and it is reasonable to expect that the attacker will stop the meaningless efforts. Through intensive simulation experiment using NS-2, we have verified the effectiveness of our approach and evaluated the cost and overhead of the system.